or… Tales of a 30 year old Nothing.

Tag Archives: guns

I was raised in the Catholic church. The Catholic church is what the religious community would call fundamentalist. What the H-E-C-K is that?

Let’s go GOOOOOOOOGLE it!

The All-Seeing-All-Knowing-Great-and-Powerful voice of the Internet defines a fundamentalist as a person who believes in the strict, literal interpretation of scripture in a religion.

Yeah, that was me. Certain ideas that come along with fundamentalism are:

Creationism. The Earth was created in a literal six days.

There was a literal Adam and Eve, real people in a real garden.

Noah put two of each animal onto an ark.

The facts of the story are the facts of the story and the facts of the story are literal.

When I was in high school, in ninth grade, I have a very powerful memory of sitting in my Biology classroom while my teacher, a hulking football coach with the body of a line-backer, explained what evolution was.

Any questions? he asked.

No hands go up except mine. The truth is, I don’t have a question. I have a statement and I’m about to drop a Knowledge Bomb on this entire class. Get ready for this treat.

“Johnny?” he calls on me and I can almost hear in his voice that he doesn’t expect much to roll out of my mouth. Why would he? I fail nearly every class I’m in and spend every single Saturday in detention. I had a track record of being a brilliant rock-star and I’m about to back it up even further.

“Mr. Bailey. Today is April 1st. Happy Evolutionist Day.”

What a joker I was. What a cocky, thoughtless, sub-human, unconscious animal I was. A chimpanzee wearing Vans and a crucifix around my neck. A WWJD bracelet adorning my wrist.

He cocks a beefy eyebrow at me. My extremely clever joke has gone over his great gorilla head, it seems. I try to speak on his level.

“Today is April 1st. Today is April Fools Day. Happy Evolutionist Day.” Because only a fool could believe in evolution.

Everyone sitting in my class was being fed some laughable story about evolution from this brain-washed academic messenger. Goodness. His tale about man from monkey (not to mention amoeba) was insanely laughable. It was crazy. It was koo-koo-bananas.

Mr. Bailey takes a deep breath. “Please enlighten us, Mr. Brookbank.”

“God created us. God made us.” I recite.

“When?”

“Recently. About six or seven thousand years ago.”

“How do you know?”

“The Bible told me so.”

“And the Bible was written by?”

“God. Man. Man inspired by God.”

He tries another angle but I block him. “John. Do you believe that Noah put all those animals on the ark?” “Yes.” “Two of each?” “Yes.” “How did he feed them?”

Shit. I hadn’t thought about this. Thankfully, I had an answer for things I hadn’t thought about. “God made it okay. God can do anything.” Ah, yes. That’s a clever one. The Wild Card. The Get-Out-Of-Jail free card. Works every time.

The rest of the class is mostly disengaged, happy that they’ve escaped talk of DNA and the process of natural selection for at least a short amount of time.

“If Adam and Eve were the first humans, wouldn’t their children be bred by incest?”

“No. Incest is an abomination but it was okay then.” I kind of start to panic. I blurt out my red button phase that rockets me into the untouchable zone. “God is mysterious and his powers are not understood by man.”

The conversation ultimately ends with me raising an eyebrow and balking at his idiocy. I walked out of the class, absolutely shocked and appalled that such a person would be allowed to teach the youth. What a complete moron.

I was so proud of myself when this happened. I had stood up for my personal beliefs. I had bravely confronted psychological evil in the world. I knew my ideas were different but I was okay with being the black sheep. I did it for Jesus. I couldn’t stand down and let these guys get the best of my homie. He had died for me. The least I could do is get his back in Biology 101. How would I ever be a Warrior for Christ in The Real World if I couldn’t even verbally defend my faith within the confines of a classroom?

You want to get in shape? Create a habit of going to the gym. You want a clean house? Create a habit of cleaning your house. You want to be confident? Create a habit of telling yourself that you’re confident. You want to hold a belief, any belief, create a habit of telling it to yourself every single day.

I think, therefore I am.

You want to be a fundamentalist, go to a church where they reinforce that idea. Have your family and friends reinforce the idea. And if you’re born into it, even better. You don’t ever have to think that maybe there is another option. When I was a kid, I was so thankful that my parents had raised me in the one single correct religion. Thank God! Literally.

What would have happened to me, I often thought to myself, if I had been born in some filthy country where they worshipped Allah? My uncle was a Muslim and I think he might be going to Hell. His kids too. And probably his wife. Which was a shame because I kind of liked them. If I had been born into that land, amongst those people, I would have had to go out, find Jesus on my own, leave my native faith, commit to Christ and then be saved. That seemed like a lot of work and also that country and the people seemed kind of dirty and so I was really thankful to be where I was. They were hell-bound blasphemers who believed in a silly invisible God that told them what was right and wrong. And they prayed to him, hahahahaha. Idiots.

April 1st was also Happy Muslim Day, it would seem.

I thought to myself, Thank God that I was born into the greatest place on earth. Thank God I was born into the correct religion. Thank God…..”

….that I didn’t have to think for myself.

Thank God that I had been raised to be thoughtless. Thank God I had been raised to disavow the use of my own human logic in favor of a faceless and fact-less belief system that told me everything I thought was right and everything everyone else thought was wrong.

Thy ego is starving. Let us feed it with self-righteousness. YUUUUUUUMMY. It is bitter with ignorance but sweet with self-satisfaction.

I was so right, in fact, that I didn’t even have to read a book to know I was right. I didn’t need to read the biology books because they were full of lies. Science was always trying to “explain everything” and that we should just trust in God more.

Carbon dating was a joke because, didn’t my teacher know, that someone in my church told me that scientists somewhere had carbon dated a living turtle and the results said it was 10,000 years old? But the reality was that there was no study. It was just a guy at my church.

It was just a willfully ignorant, brain-dead drone repeating mindless drivel that the other lemmings had been mumbling to themselves. And I digested it and I repeated it. And it felt good to be right.

But then something interesting happened to me later in life. It was life-changing. It, quite literally, quite fundamentally, rocked my entire world.

I read a book.

Nothing in particular. I just read a book.

I looked at what was presented and for the first time in my life I realized that I only believed what I believed because I had been told to not look at the other side. Stand by your faith. Be strong. There is no value to their opinions. You have the truth. You have the answer. You don’t even need to consider another side. And when you are tempted to look and consider, just remember that The Dark One is tempting you. Come back to safety, my little sheep.

But when I looked, when I read, when I ingested, when I saw, when I thought, when I took the bite of the Apple from the Tree of Knowledge, my eyes and my mind opened and I saw.

I Saw.

I saw that the idea of the world being created in seven thousand years was not only preposterous but one that was borderline absolutely insane. And I don’t use that lightly. I use it like mental ward, asylum, existing outside of reality insane.

It was Insane what I had believed for the past TWENTY-FIVE YEARS. That is a fucking long time to be, by any standard, super-stupid.

And then… The Internet. We were no longer living in caves. We were no longer illiterate. We were no longer sourcing our facts from distant philosophers and great thinkers. We didn’t even have to go to the library to get a book anymore. We didn’t even have to get it from our teachers. The Internet – it was a portal into the purest knowledge and it sits inside of our back pocket. With a few quick key-strokes, you could have a nearly unending supply of information from any and all sides of any and all topics.

There are two kinds of people, in my opinion, that are allowed to be Creationists. The first are the elderly. Many of them don’t have access to the internet. Bad eyes. Tired. Etc. The other group are children who can’t read.

Everyone in between those two groups no longer has any excuse for not taking the time to properly educate themselves on their own biological history. Pure ignorance is no longer acceptable with Time Warner. The internet has taken every single other reasonable option completely off the table. If you don’t know, you aren’t looking.

Reminds me of my kids. “I can’t find my shoes!”

“Then you aren’t looking. They’re sitting right by the door.”

“Oh.”

There is an amazing amount of anger and contempt that exists inside of me for having ever been told that all of this – our world – was made recently. It infuriates me that I was encouraged to be ignorant. It upsets me – truly – that I was taught such wild and inconceivable tales.

I like to tell myself that it was different for me when I was younger. The Internet was picking up but wasn’t nearly as ingrained in our daily lives as it is today. Today, I tell myself, if you believe the world was created less than ten thousand years ago, you are committing the greatest sin of all.

You are choosing to intentionally remain willfully ignorant in the face of facts and endless amounts of evidence.

Carbon dating doesn’t work because–

Because you don’t understand it. That’s why. And you don’t understand it because you refuse to try to understand it. And that’s just lazy.

In the age of YouTube, you can learn about how carbon dating works in a four minute video.

Today I sit down and I look at two options and I say to myself…

OPTION 1

Slowly, slowly, slowly, over the course of great amounts of time, life developed on this planet, growing from a small force, to a Force to be Reckoned with. We see this drama of life play out over and over again with plants, animals and even the cycles of the seasons. It is repeatable and predictable.

OPTION 2

God farted everything out in six days and humanity in one. Nothing like this has ever happened before or since. No one was there. No one saw it. There is no evidence of it except for a book with no author. A glove that doesn’t fit.

Now, if I’m sitting in a courtroom and I have to decide which of these I’m choosing…. I mean, Option 2 feels like a story a kid would write. It feels objectively silly when you stack it against the other and A//B them like that.

It is laughable (but also horrifying) to think there are people (adults) who select OPTION B. Who are these people? What makes them select something that is so entirely and clearly wrong? You can have a vacation on the beautiful beaches of Hawaii or we can send you to Guantanamo Bay, where you will be tortured for weeks on end! The choice is yours!

I don’t know, Bob…. OPTION….B?

Here’s another multiple choice, this one a little closer to reality.

OPTION A

Particles in the clouds create electric charge, build up and cause lightening.

OPTION B

God is throwing lightening bolts.

One of them has facts and things we can observe and read about and replicate. One of them is a fortune cookie that was written by people before people knew what science was. It’s crazy how easy this test is. It’s crazy how many people fail.

It is tremendously disturbing to me when I have conversations with people who are Fundamental Creationists and I realize that they vote.

Individuals – and quite a large group of them – who are unable to review information from both sides and make a rational decision on their own are able to vote and craft the voice of our country. It is terrifying to me. They aren’t listening to themselves. They aren’t reading. So how do they decide? They just wait for someone to tell them what to do, where to stand, how to think. In the game of chess, these are called Pawns and they are disposable because there are so many of them. In real life we call these Pawns soldiers and we send them to die for some purpose. I think it has to do with protecting our fence or our oil or our God – or is it our freedom? I can’t keep up with it.

More than bashing on the population base of Creationists (which I’m also doing because it really does deeply upset me at my core level), I am writing to say that I am so thankful that I have been broken from the bondage of faith. Faith is the enemy of intelligence. And lack of intelligence is the enemy of Man. And Willful Ignorance is Evil Incarnate.

The question that was posed to me during a church class echoes back through my mind. Why does science have to try and EXPLAIN everything?

Today I understand that the answer is not the problem. That is just a crazy-stupid question. CRAZY stupid.

Because if we lived in a world where we didn’t try to explain things, we wouldn’t progress, we would still be living in caves yelling at Kronk to just put down that fucking wheel. Listen, Kronk! If God wanted us to have fire, he would have given it to us! Quit dabbling in The Dark Arts!

In 2018, Fundamentalism is not fun. But it is mental. Like crazy. Like fucking bonkers. Like the chicken from Moana seeing the wall but just walking directly into it over and over again.

Evidence of the wall does not matter. Keep marching. Keep marching. Keep marching. Evidence does not matter. Evidence not matter. Evidence does not matter. I am right. I am right. I am right. I sleep at night. God loves me. Amen.

I hope I’ve adequately offended you enough to at least go YouTube something. SOMETHING. Challenge your beliefs. Challenge yourself. Open yourself to the idea that you actually may be stupid like I was, marching around publicly proclaiming how under-developed my brain was.

Larger than 9-11. Larger than Area-51. Larger than Crop Circles. The idea that millions and millions and millions of people believe, without evidence, that the Earth is 7,000 years young is The Ultimate Conspiracy Theory. At that point you might as well believe that the Earth is flat and that the Sun commits to doing large circles around us.

Open the trap-door. Look into the darkness. Then jump down into it.

What if I’ve spent my whole life believing a lie?

No! Your brain immediately shrieks in response. It’s too insane to even consider. The Dark One again, tempting you with knowledge.

Better to be what God desires me to be – an ostrich with my head shoved down into the sand, listening to the gentle hum of my own heartbeat, ensuring me that I and I alone, am saved.

I think back on my Biology Classroom Experience and I shutter with embarrassment. How much patience that teacher had with me, I’ll perhaps never know. How much empathy he had for me, I’ll never know either but I look back at myself and I look out at people I know who still believe these things and it feels like my heart breaks for them. I’m so sad that they live such shallow, unsaturated, lives with boring belief systems that shrink down the magnanimous beauty of our ever-expanding universe into a novelty trinket that can be contained in four words and be mindlessly repeated by any child old enough to mimic.

God can do anything.

You could probably even teach it to a parrot.

God can do anything.

Including make a race of apes that know how to pull a trigger but not read, it seems.

God can do anything.

Including encouraging you to believe an enormous story with zero evidence. Heads up, that happens anywhere else in life and you would be called a raving lunatic.

Water does not come out of my sink through the pipes. I turn on my God-faucet and Jesus juice pours out.It looks like it comes from the pipes. But it doesn’t. It comes from the … Jesus Juice place….

Are you a raving lunatic?

Perhaps.

I was. Shrieking outlandish and incoherent thoughts in my biology class. There was no reason to learn.

I already knew everything.

What a sad, pathetic little creature I was. So wrapped up in my own absolute certainty that I left no room for exploration.

I am so thankful for the internet and books and knowledge and science and academics and philosophers and people who think and inspire us all to think and to lead mentally active life-styles. I am so thankful that I live in a world wherein I am not just allowed but encouraged, to learn and expand my intellectual horizons.

I’m going to wrap this up with my own personal beliefs, which are an opinion and which, like the rest of this post, is probably pretty offensive.

If you take your children to church, but don’t watch BBC Planet Earth with them, you are doing our society a great disservice. You are harming mankind by intentionally closing malleable minds off from information that would make them Greater Than. You are intentionally stunting their growth and handicapping their ability to problem solve and use critical thinking skills.

But my faith is important to me!

Well, ignorance is bliss. And you look very blissful.

Very blissful.

Also, you can teach your child about love and forgiveness and compassion without teaching them about impossible magic that fucks with their heads and leaves them with a gap between imagination and reality for the rest of their lives.

I shudder, thinking to myself again that these people with wildly low IQs not only vote, but own guns.

Having had my membership at the Burbank Firing Range for just over a month now and still having had not used it, I decided to exercise my second amendment by setting a mandate to have a Man-Date with my friend Curtis. The man was raised in South Africa, has eaten live frogs, been chased by elephants and once poked a dead body that he found with a stick. From where I was standing, he seemed like the obvious choice as a partner for my first personal foray into the world of home defense.

From the outside, showing up to a firing range has always seemed to me to be very similar to showing up at the Crap’s table in Vegas. You’re standing in Caesar’s Palace in your cheap polished shoes and ten dollar haircut, stretching up on your very tippy-tap-tip-toes, trying to see just what’s going on at this table without looking like you don’t know what’s going on. You so badly want to approach the table, slap down your chips and say, “14 on 11, baby! Let it ride!” but, since you don’t know what either “14” or “11” are or if there actually are 14s or 11s in the game of Craps… you decide to just continue walking to safer ground like Black Jack or Slots or the Subway Sandwich Shop. To me, guns are just like that. I desperately want to be in the know… but I desperately am not.

Two weeks ago, after dropping a friend’s parents off at the airport at 7am, I was feeling rather brave and adventurous and had decided that I was going to go to the gun range that very morning, first thing’s first and just go “fire off a few rounds, bro” all by myself. So, fantastic, empowered attitude in hand, I cranked up The Dillinger Escape Plan on my car stereo and, with their vicious guitars and speed metal drumming, I shot through the peaceful streets of Burbank with bullets on my brain. I was going to do this. I was going to go shoot a gun. I was going to go do it all alone! CARPE DIEM! Just me and my minivan! Outlaws!

In the distance I can see the street light that marks my turn. I start to imagine walking into the range, probably in slow motion, some bearded Republican that looks like one of the characters from Duck Dynasty sitting behind the counter. I gently rap my knuckles on the table and he says, “What kind of gun you want?” And I say, “A… uh… something… gentle? I’m, you see, new…” and then he’s asking me all sorts of questions and making me fill out forms and dismantle guns and making sure that I know how to operate them and, truly, I mostly don’t; the extent of my knowledge reaching out to, “Bullet goes here, finger goes here, bang-bang.”

He’s making me clean the guns and asking me what parts are what and timing me as I put them back together. This isn’t supposed to happen! He makes me match specific guns to specific bullets and, when I ultimately fail the test, which I undoubtedly would, he revokes my license, keeps my money and kindly asks me to leave. “This place is for pros, Goober. Beat it. Run back to momma and drink yer milk.”

I scamper towards the door with salty tears and mascara running down my face.

The anxiety ridden imaginings of What-Could-Be ultimately come to an end just as I’m reaching the light at Victory Blvd. and, like a bullet on a straight trajectory, I just blow past the range, back towards my house. “Maybe next time,” I tell myself. “Maybe… tomorrow.”

Days pass and then weeks pass and then I’m feeling like a complete and total cowardly noobian and so, ultimately, discuss the possibility with my South African friend (I specifically mention his country of origin a second time so that you’ll know that I’m a culturally diverse individual) of going to the Ol’ Range to “Pop some Caps”. He obliges and I pick him up two nights hence.

When I pull up in front of his house, he’s standing on the curb, in the dark. He hops in the passenger side of my car and says, “My wife is watching Pretty Little Liars with some friends,” and then he smiles and I think he might be trying to contain his sanity. I notice his hand is shaking and strange little laughs keep popping out of his mouth after every sentence. “They’re watching Pretty Little Liars – hehe – and – haha – I just – he-haw – have to go – hmm – shoot a gun.”

This is what we do. We are men. Combustion excites us. Show me a man who doesn’t like starting a fire and I’ll show you a woman.

We arrive at The Range, park the car in the dark lot out back and walk inside. We’re not moving in as slow of a motion as I’d like to, but, for dramatic effect, it’s good enough. We pass a cop on his way out and I imagine him standing in the lane with his service revolver out, screaming, “Freeze! Freeze or I’ll blow yer head off, Criminal Scumbag!” Blam! Blam! Blam! He lights up the room and cuts the paper target clean in half with his precision marksmanship.

The door closes behind the cop with a click and I look back at the counter where a small crowd of people are gathered. My nerves start doing that thing wherein they fill with electricity and start making my hands sweat. “Man…” I think, “Here we go. They’re going to ask me all these questions and I am going to be made a fool in front of everyone!…… Including my friend from South Africa (he’s white by the way… a white South African. Like a two dollar bill, they’re more common than you’d think… oh, to have a truly exotic friend; an Eskimo or a Kenyan…)

We approach the counter and a slightly overweight fellow with some unfortunately shaved facial hair stares at us for what, seems to me, to be an uncomfortably long time. His stare continues for so long, in fact, that I begin to wonder if he’s waiting for me to give him a secret password.

Finally he says, “What… can I help you with?” and I say, “I… would like to shoot a gun,” and he says, “And what… would you like to shoot?” and I say, “I…” and then freeze. It’s happening! It’s all happening! The questions! Quick! What sort of guns do you know… a handgun… shotgun… revolver… wait, was that only in cowboy days? Can I say “revolver”???

I look down at the case and, seeing a Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum (I know it because there’s a small placard resting next to it) gleaming like a diamond in the glass case, I point at it and say, “Dirty Harry,” and the man says, “What?” and I say, “Sorry. Uh… that one,” and he reaches into the case and pulls out a decently sized hand cannon for me to serve my justice with.

Soul Patch says, “What about you, Hot Shot?” and Curtis, full of confidence and knowledge, doesn’t even point to the case. He just says, “Beretta,” and the clerk pops one out. Staring at the display, it seems as though there were at least four “Berettas” sitting before us but the two of them seemed to share some kind of “Man Code” that allowed them to know exactly what the other was thinking. A code, which I was obviously not privy to.

The Shop Smith hands us our guns, our ear plugs and our eye glasses and points us to the back with, “Lane 6 and 7.” My own lane!!?? We walk past a giant poster of Clint Eastwood and my courage comes back to me as I just think, “Hell. Yeah.” We walk through a door into a small ante-room where a sign reads, “Only Open One Door At a TIME!” so we allow the first door to close before opening the second but… when we do… explosions fill my plugged ears and vibrations rock my body.

The room is made of gray concrete and is mostly empty, save for three other people. Curtis and I approach our parallel lanes, clip up our targets with human silhouettes printed on them and send them halfway out into the darkness. I pick up my gun, which, upon second examination is actually the size of my entire forearm, and stare at it, wondering how I make the little circle part pop out… you know… the, uh… the part where the bullets go.

The chambers? The cylinder?

Suddenly Curtis is behind me, breathing in my ear and he says, “You know how to use that?” and I sheepishly grimace and say, “Finger goes… ah… no…” and he laughs because he is used to me being incompetent and then, like a teacher demonstrating to an exceptionally undereducated student, he shows me how it all works.

I snap open the chamber, hammer in the rounds, 1 through 7, spin the cylinder and snap it close. At first I try doing it with a flick of my wrist but, after realizing that I lack proper arm strength, I just politely close it with my left hand while mumbling gently, “There ya go…” I raise the gun up to eye level and line it up with my target, aiming for, of course, his head. I want his death to be quick and painless. My justice is firm.

I place my finger on the trigger, line up my sights, hold my breath and… nothing happens. The trigger is stuck on something. What… I think to myself… would a cowboy do…

I stare at the gun and, like the sun’s first morning rays cutting through darkness, it dawns on me.

The Hammer.

I lift my thumb, pull down that heavy lever, watch the chamber gently slide one space counter-clockwise and hear the entire mechanism give that famous cuh-LICK.

I let out my breath, pull it in, line up my sights and start thinking to myself, “Don’t drop the gun don’t drop the gun don’t drop the gun when it goes off it’s going to have a serious kick and don’t drop the gun don’t shoot yourself in the foot don’t drop the gun they’ll never let you return!”

I pull the trigger and the last thing I see is a spark of white that turns into a cloud of white that turns into a flash of white as it fills my vision. The gun recoils and the bullet is gone, blasting away The Paper Man’s brain and skull fragments. Freeze, Criminal Scum!

I pull the hammer and squeeze the trigger, again, again, again. All seven rounds get emptied down the alley and, when I pull my target back, I see that they’ve all hit their marks; several in the head, several in the heart, one in each shoulder. I pin up a new target, throw it out, reload, fire and…. I miss every one. I mean, I don’t just miss my desired marks… I miss the target completely. I’m not sure how this happened but I like to think that the bullets actually just went through the old bullet holes.

I like to think that it’s extreme beginner’s luck.

To my right I can hear Curtis squeezing off round after round, making his bank robber dance left and right. On my other side is a man with some kind of gun that is so incredibly, ridiculously, monstrously huge that every time he fires, my butt hole turns into a tight knot and my heart skips like a scratched record. His shells fly into the air, over the wall and onto my head. I’m being rained on by brass.

Curtis and I switch guns, switch back and then watch the guy with the nuke next door fire off a few A-Bombs before we ultimately package up and leave. We drop everything off, pay, get in the car and go sip on coffee that is just barely too hot for our lips while we, two street wise, gun toting, hard asses, chat about our respective children.

In a couple weeks, like some famous machine from the future, I’ll be back.

I’m standing on a dirt road holding a rifle somewhere in Montana. There are no bullets in the gun so, as of right now, it’s really nothing more than a fancy club. I look around and, as far as the eye can see, there is nothing but pasture. It’s not even farm land. It’s just… grass and weeds and rocks. I suspect that people call it “God’s Country” because it looks just like it did on the day He created it.

I’m at a shooting range just outside Billing’s city limits with my two brother-in-laws, each of them flanking either side of me, all of us trying to gather in the dwindling shade of the SUV’s popped hatch. The first, to my left, is Jarod. He’s just entered his mid-30s and has the body of a guy that used to be a wrestler (because he was) and dark wavy hair that covers his earlobes. When he heard we were going to go shoot guns, he rolled out of bed and hopped in the car, sweatpants still on from the night before. He holds a coffee and rubs sleep from his eyes.

On my right is Jarod’s younger brother and my other brother-in-law, a red-haired man named Jordan who is one of these people that, once you meet him, you won’t forget him.

Ever.

He has bright red hair that wafts out into tight curls, creating the illusion of sun-fire surrounding his head. Underneath that, a scraggly red beard encompasses his face, ending somewhere around his collar bone. His skin is pale and covered in freckles. He’s one part Ronald McDonald and one part Unibomber. He also has, what one may consider, an encyclopedic knowledge of guns and gun history and gun production and the mechanisms of guns and gun safety and what, in his opinion, is best and why and why you’re probably wrong.

As I set the rifle down on the table, Jordan begins walking over the gun with me; Wikipedia giving me my own private lesson. “This gun is called a such-and-such,” Frankly, I can’t remember all / any of the details that were being thrown at me in rapid sucession so you’ll just have to bare with me, “This is the safety. Red means fire. You’ll see how the ergonomics of this gun works. Your left hand goes here, your right hand goes here,” and he moves my hands so I know. “Hug the gun, rest your cheek against the side of the stock and look through the scope. Let me tell you about parallax,” and he does, “Here is the magazine, it’s loaded, insert it here; pull this back,” click-click, “Okay, you’ve got one in the chamber. Once you take this gun off of safety, it’s ready to fire. Keep your finger off the trigger until–”

“HOWDY FOLKS!”

I turn sideways and see a heavy set man approaching our car. He’s got a shaved head and a mustache that resembles Monterrey Jack from the old Chip n’ Dale cartoon; shaved right down the middle but dangling in waxed shoestrings on either side of his mouth. He looks like a Mongolian Warlord……. a white Mongolian Warlord. His cream colored vest has a million pockets and a name-tag attached to it that reads, “DALE”. He’s got, what appears to me, in my extremely limited knowledge of video game firearms, to be a shotgun slung over his shoulder which he carries around like an electric guitar.

“WHATCHYOO FELLAS UP TO OVER HERE?!” He talks like this, in all caps, his eyes enormous white orbs. He laughs after almost everything he says and his jolly belly jiggles; Santa with a gun. Jordan steps forward and tells the man that he’s just out here teaching me how to shoot a gun. The subtext of this statement is, of course, “Leave us alone, we’re in the middle of some stuff.”

“TEACHIN’ SOME GUNPLAY, HUH?,” Then, noticing the rifle, “OH! SHE’S A PURTY ONE! JUST A BEAUTIFUL STOCK! BEAUTIFUL STOCK! SCOPE TOO?! I HAD A BROTHER-IN-LAW THAT WAS A CRYPTOLOGIST IN THE MILITARY BUT THEN HE QUIT AND BECAME A SNIPER AND NOW I HUNT WITH HIM! THE MAN CAN HIT A GOPHER AT 1/2 A MILE AWAY WITH A HANDGUN……..NO SCOPE! NO SCOPE!”

Having no idea if this is possible or not, I look over at Jordan, who slowly crosses his arms and says, “Sounds like a real sharp shooter.” Subtext, “No, he can’t.”

Monterrey Jack continues, “I WAS WATCHIN’ IN MY BINOCULARS! SAW THE LITTLE CRITTER FLIP INTO THE AIR ON THE FIRST BLAST AND THEN, GET THIS, BEFORE HE EVEN HIT THE GROUND, MY OL’ BROTHER-IN-LAW SHOT HIM AGAIN, POPPED HIM RIGHT UP IN THE AIR AGAIN! AND SIX BLOCKS AIN’T EVEN AN EXAGGERATION! BELIEVE IT OR NOT, WE GOT BACK IN THAT CAR AND WATCHED THE ODOMETER AS WE DROVE OVER TO THIS LITTLE FELLA. 1/2 MILE, THERE IT IS!”

Jordan says, “Impressive,” and then turns around and begins organizing his truck, hoping to shun the man out of existence. Dale continues, “I WAS IN VIETNAM, ONE OF THOSE TINY BOATS; 1000 ROUNDS PER EVERY HIT OVER THERE! HAR-HAR-HAR! TODAY I MAKE MY OWN DYNAMITE! MAKE MY OWN FUSES AND ALL!” at which point he goes into very long-winded detail about the best way to make a fuse. Jordan, being a man that re-shells his own bullets and a perfectionist of the art, speaks up and says, “Okay, so you make this fuse. Certainly we’re talking about human error in the process; how are you able to gauge how long the burn is? How can you KNOW?” and Dale looks at him and says, “I JUST LIGHT THE SUNNABITCH AND THROW IT!”

Jordan walks away, back to organizing his truck. His nature won’t allow him to entertain such idiocy. Meanwhile, Jarod keeps throwing out the casual, “Wow, sounds like you’ve got a great thing – anyway – we’re just trying to–” “I JUST SOLD ALL MY GUNS! HAD TO MOVE INTO A DIFFERENT APARTMENT! BOUGHT THIS ONE INSTEAD! FRONT LOADED, BLACK POWDER, SOMETHING-SOMETHING!” Me, I can’t help it. I find the man fascinating, like Daffy Duck with a shotgun, and just keep asking him questions. “How long were you in the military? What branch? How many guns did you sell? What is this one here? What is black powder? You make your own DYNAMITE?! You make your own FUSES?! Why do you need to make your own dynamite? What are you using it for?”

No pause, “BLOW SHIT UP! HAR-HAR-HAR!”

I give a laugh but it’s sort of nervous.

“WELL, BOYS!”…. and just like that, he wanders back to his Jeep, presumably to leave. Jordan shouts at me, “Let’s go, Cocheese!” (side note, I have no idea where this nickname came from but it has become a staple, along with Buford.) I straddle up along the rifle again and find all the grips. I shut my left eye against the sun and gaze through the scope. I find the bright yellow gopher target we’ve placed at the end of the path, roughly 70 yards away, line up my sights and slowly exhale. I’ve never sighted anything on a scope before and I could count the number of guns I’ve fired on two fingers and everything is silent and the wind is blowing and I’m trying to figure out how much the wind would effect my trajectory and mostly, I just want to nail that fake gopher to the ground and show my brothers (by law) that I can.

I push my thumb against the safety and hear it click. To my right, Jordan says, very quietly, “That’s a live gun. Just pull the trigger.” I pull my index finger off the trigger guard and place it on the trigger proper. “Lightly,” Jordan whispers. I raise the cross-hairs from the gopher’s guts to his head. We’re gonna make this one count. I squeeze the gun to my body, brace myself, everything goes quiet and BANG!!! It’s the loudest recoil I’ve ever heard… and I didn’t even have to pull the trigger.

I pull my face away from the sight, push my thumb onto the safety again and look over the gun stock. Fifteen feet to my right, Dale has just fired his front loading shotgun into the wild. He’s not aiming at anything, he’s just… firing huge bullets at dirt.

“YEE-HAW! SONNABITCH! WUNNA YOU BOYS WANNA FIRE THIS BABY? HAR-HAR-HAR!” We all smile and turn back to our target. I line it up again, test the wind again, pretend I’m a sniper again, exhale my breath, hold it, kick the safety off, touch the trigger and behind me Dale is yammering on about a magnum and blowing up gophers and the proper boar butter to use on a crossbow and world records and his old gun collection and statistics and how things have changed in the last 30 years and I am silent, trying to aim and Jordan is silent, standing in blatant refusal to partake in conversation with this man and Jarod just drinks his coffee, occasionally spitting and giving heavy sighs that are indicative of him being exhausted with your presence.

There is a blessed lull in the conversation and I take full advantage of it. Pull the trigger and PHHTT! The gun pops and barely kicks at all. 70 yards away the gopher spins on it’s stand; a direct hit. “YEE-HAW! NAILED HER! HAR-HAR-HAR!” Jordan cracks his neck without using his hands and says, “There ya go, Cocheese. You’ve killed the mama gopher. Now, while all her youngins are moping around, mourning her death, you need to peg each of them,” and he points at the shattered remains of various clay pigeons. “Make every shot count. Clean house.”

I miss all of the imaginary fake gopher babies.

I kill a lot of dirt.

ABOVE: How I feel when I hold a gun.

BELOW: How I look when I hold a gun.

I look up and Dale is packing things up. He says, “I GIVE YOU BOYS MY CARD?” and Jordan says, “Nope,” and Dale says, “WELL, HELL! WHERE’S MY MANNERS!?” and he snaps a card out of his vest pocket. Jordan stares at it for a moment before he says, “I knew I knew you! You used to come into (insert famous Montana Sporting Goods Store here) a couple years ago! I knew you looked familiar!” and Dale says, “OH, YEAH! OH, YEAH! I USED TO COME IN THERE BUT THEY SCREWED ME OVER,” and Jordan says, “I worked there for a couple years. I knew I knew your face,” and the way Jordan says this makes me think something is up.

“SURE! SURE! SUPPOSE YOU DID! I APPLIED TWICE BUT THE IDIOT MANAGER NEVER HIRED ME! WHOEVER WAS RUNNING THAT GUN DEPARTMENT SURE AS SHIT DIDN’T KNOW WHAT THEY WAS DOING!” and Jordan says, “Well… Corporate America.”

Dale gets into his Jeep and shouts, “HAVE FUN!” and then he’s driving away, gone forever, plumes of dirt chasing him down the road.

ABOVE: Guns don’t kill people. Richard kills people.

Jordan turns around and says, “That man would come into (insert famous Montana Sporting Goods store here) for hours and hours and ramble endlessly to anyone that would listen to his “knowledge” of guns. He applied twice and the idiot manager who worked in the gun department that refused to hire him was ME.”

Har. Har. Har.

As I watched Dale’s car shrink into the distance, I couldn’t help but wonder if all of his puffery were just a subtle F-You to the unforgettable face that wouldn’t hire him. “LOOK HOW MUCH I KNOW! LOOK WHAT YOU MISSED OUT ON! HAR-HAR-HAR!”

I fire the rifle again and the fake mother gopher spins on her stand, leaving another round of imaginary gopher children orphaned.